David Hammons

What: Live virtual discussion about David Hammons, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Day’s End. Why: The Whitney’s “Ask a Curator” series continues June 30 with “David Hammons and Gordon Matta-Clark in the Whitney’s Collection,” a live Zoom discussion about Hammons’s recently installed permanent work, Day’s End, an homage to Matta-Clark’s 1975 similarly named intervention in an abandoned industrial building on Pier 52 at the southern edge of Gansevoort Peninsula. Whitney curators Adrienne Edwards and Elisabeth Sussman will also explore other works in the museum’s collection by the two artists, some of which were on display last fall in “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970–1986.”

“David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979” began with the artist at work. The entrance to the exhibition at the Drawing Center was lined with photographs of Hammons, taken by Bruce W. Talamon in 1974 and 1977, at the studios in South Los Angeles where Hammons started his career. In the photographs that document his singular printmaking process, Hammons is shirtless and slicked with margarine, crouching to consider white sheets of paper before pressing one part of his body down on the paper at a precise angle, his other limbs flung wide. Once christened with a sprinkle of powdered pigment, these grease marks would reveal shockingly intricate figurative impressions, which Hammons then arranged into scenes of play, prayer, and, often, political reflection. These works, thirty-two of which were presented at the Drawing Center, are expansive and abstracted riffs on Black living that revel in their emotional ambiguity.

David Hammons is having a moment, a New York one at that. Following the unveiling of his permanent Day’s End sculpture at the Hudson River Park near the Whitney Museum and a survey of the artist’s body prints at the Drawing Center, Hammons is now displaying thought-provoking works at Nahmad Contemporary. As part of an exhibition entitled “Basketball & Kool-Aid,” the artist developed a selection of pieces made using ragged basketballs sourced from New York’s Harlem neighborhood and Kool-aid that draw upon his personal experiences as Black man while touching on racial stereotypes, prejudices, and identities in the United States.

The Whitney Museum of American Art, with the Hudson River Park Trust, has permanently installed a sprawling public art project by the seminal American artist, David Hammons. Entitled Day’s End, the massive installation is situated at the Hudson River Park along the southern edge of Gansevoort Peninsula, directly across from the Museum. Hammons is best known for his interdisciplinary practice which includes sculptural, print-based, video, and painted work that explore African-American art history.

Support Hyperallergic’s independent arts journalism. Become a member today ». Last fall, in my role of visiting art critic at a northeast college, I had so many conversations about the intricacies of process with student artists that I realized that I’m actually vested in regarding art as a form of communication and a vehicle for making meaning. The student artists demonstrated that they are well versed in the language of motivation, method, and ambition, and in using these elements of their process to both justify and explain their work. In the contemporary art scene, this feels very much like the air we breathe. Then I see an exhibition at the Drawing Center of David Hammons’s body prints made between 1968 and 1979 where method, intention, and significance are all in accord with each other. I was intrigued to see Hammons, a Black artist now in his late 70s, after learning about his magpie practice across a range of mediums, including a performance where he sold snowballs on a New York City street in 1983. He has a reputation as a self-fashioned, resolutely outsider artist who garners immense respect while never having settled on a signature style — thus clearly invested in process.